A cenotaph is an empty tomb or a monument erected in honour of a person or group of people whose remains are elsewhere. It can also be the initial tomb for a person who has since been reinterred elsewhere. Although the vast majority of cenotaphs honour individuals, many noted cenotaphs are instead dedicated to the memories of groups of individuals, such as the lost soldiers of a country or of an empire.

A monument is a type of structure that was explicitly created to commemorate a person or event, or which has become relevant to a social group as a part of their remembrance of historic times or cultural heritage, due to its artistic, historical, political, technical or architectural importance. Some of the first monuments were dolmens or menhirs, megalithic constructions built for religious or funerary purposes. Examples of monuments include statues, (war) memorials, historical buildings, archaeological sites, and cultural assets. If there is a public interest in its preservation, a monument can for example be listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Cultural Heritage and Conflict gives the next definition of monument:Monuments result from social practices of construction or conservation of material artifacts through which the ideology of their promoters is manifested. The concept of the modern monument emerged with the development of capital and the nation-state in the fifteenth century when the ruling classes began to build and conserve what were termed monuments. These practices proliferated significantly in the nineteenth century, creating the ideological frameworks for their conservation as a universal humanist duty. The twentieth century has marked a movement toward some monuments being conceived as cultural heritage in the form of remains to be preserved, and concerning commemorative monuments, there has been a shift toward the abstract counter monument. In both cases, their conflictive nature is explicit in the need for their conservation, given that a fundamental component of state action following the construction or declaration of monuments is litigating vandalism and iconoclasm. However, not all monuments represent the interests of nation-states and the ruling classes; their forms are also employed beyond Western borders and by social movements as part of subversive practices which use monuments as a means of expression, where forms previously exclusive to European elites are used by new social groups or for generating anti-monumental artifacts that directly challenge the state and the ruling classes. In conflicts, therefore, it is not so much the monument which is relevant but rather what happens to the communities that participate in its construction or destruction and their instigation of forms of social interaction.